But what does it mean to prepare our world for the Incarnation? What does it mean to pave a way for God through a planet groaning from exploitation, through societies plagued by inequity, through religious and political systems corrupted by power and privilege? What does it mean to make a path for God through the streets of Ferguson, down the halls of power, across the bridges of New York City, down the aisles of our great cathedrals, through he slums of Mumbai?
These teams don’t approach critique as “What feedback can we give this designer about their work?” Instead, the team members see critique as “What can each of us learn from the work this designer has done?” Everyone walks out of the session with new knowledge and perspective about their designs.
While these promising experiments and new start-ups a proving the value of deeper forms of listening, as an industry we still have a lot to learn. Listening is after all not a passive act, but rather an active skill that we can learn and employ strategically. As the examples above make clear there are many different kinds of listening with different goals and outcomes. Below I’ve tried to map out five models for listening at the intersection of newsrooms and communities.
A new version of theguardian.com is being unleashed today, and its launch marks an important moment in open development—because, for many readers, the new site isn’t new at all. It was developed entirely in the open, with the code in a public GitHub repo and the design being refined in a public beta and detailed in a project blog that discusses design concepts, the team’s collaboration with an ouside information architecture agency, various rounds of testing, and more.
Al Jazeera America designed a viewer and maker for putting comics on the web in a native, mobile-friendly way. They talk here about the design, build, and mobile interaction.
But in our efforts to improve the ways we communicate as teammates and collaborators, it’s important to understand that there are differences between feedback and critique. More specifically, there are characteristics that separate critique as just one of 3 kinds of feedback, all of which vary in their level of usefulness to us in the design process. Understanding the three kinds of feedback is key to our ability to react and use feedback in improving our creations.
Solutions journalism is rigorous and compelling reporting on responses to social problems. The Solutions Journalism Network is increasing the volume and quality of solutions journalism through our online learning platform, journalism development, and community-building.
The problem is that when a subject has been so well covered, it moves into the realm of common knowledge. We all think we understand information architecture. Yet, it is a specialist area and the things we think we know may not be correct.
Reflections on the launch of the new NewYorker.com. Helpful for any conversations, but especially the ones around journalism and design that I’m newly diving into.
Mat Marquis writes about why responsive images aren’t just an esoteric thing we’re asking for in web standards circles, but a way to stop shifting the burden of designer mistakes onto the users who use our stuff, especially people who pay for their mobile bandwidth.